The Castro in the ‘80s
From the outside and within
Being in junior high and high school in a suburb close to San Francisco during the 1980s likely meant going through a not particularly proud evolvement.
As HIV/AIDS penetrated the local consciousness in the early ‘80s, the reaction of 14-year-olds 17 miles — yet a world away —from The Castro was one of base immaturity and early-stage homophobia.
Your way of learning that gayness was a thing was wrapped in the confusing and scary news that dozens were dying every month from this new plague. Your way of reacting to this was to use a lot of homophobic slurs about pretty much anyone that was a bit different. I, for one, was creatively named “Polk Street” by a couple of classmates in 8th grade for liking bands like Devo, the B-52s and The Cars while dressing preppy. (The Polk Gulch was the pre-HIV party-central for SF gays in the 1970s).
As the ‘80s progressed, MTV (for better or worse) led in teaching tolerance to straight white teens. So did reading about the experiences of our gay neighbors in the papers. Later, gay relatives, colleagues and friends would emerge and our parents would evolve, too. But, at the time, The Castro might as well been on another continent. We really had no idea what it felt like to be at ground zero of the epidemic and its impact on people living and dying there.
And, somewhat remarkably, despite the deaths of roughly 15,000 San Franciscans from AIDS related complications from 1981 to 1996, it takes a particular interest or desire to learn about that not-so-long period of time for current city residents to be aware of that dark period.
One of the best snapshots in time comes from Frances Fitzgerald’s “The Castro” in a July 1986 The New Yorker…
“The looks of the Castro proper had changed quite noticeably since 1978. The main street, which six years ago had been in lively transition between hip and chic now had an uneven and unlived-in look to it. Boutiques selling trendy clothes and expensive home furnishings had crowded out a number of the neighborhood stores; a building and alleyway had been turned into a boutique mall…. The one shop selling gay leather gear looked musty by contrast to the shops selling three hundred dollar suede jackets.
“The Castro had become something like the Algerian city of Oran that Albert Camus described in The Plague — a city separated by the outside world, where death and the threat of death hung over everyone. By 1984, there were few gay men who did not know someone , or know of someone, who had been struck by AIDS. Most of the victims were in their twenties, thirties and forties — men in their prime of their lives. Very often they were athletic, ambitious and good-looking men who one day found a purple spot somewhere on their body. The purple spot was the the nightmare that haunted the sleep of the Castro.”
For a deeper look, a 2012 documentary called “We Were Here” brings you back to The Castro in the the ‘80s. The movie is easily accesible via many online and on-demand sources, including Amazon and Netflix. Here’s a six minute piece on the documentary from PBS’s NewsHour…
Part of the collection: “Lots of Crazy Things Have Happened in San Francisco. You Should Know About Some of Them.”
